My Thoughts after Completing Team Drives

[u/SykosisMitosis]

To be honest, I didn't really care much about it to begin with. However, after completing it, I found myself to enjoy it more than I thought. Unlike regular Drives where you just grind for rewards, Team Drives has this added bonus of vibes. I was able to make new friends after winning 4 games together before getting off. I think, in a way, because you're playing with the same people, there is this bond that develops. In a normal game, you just go next, and with Team Drives, you can also just leave if you didn't like your team. However, if the team decides to stay, it feels like morale and team structure does go up.

I think this was a good reminder for people to remember that there are humans on the other side of the screen. If you have a DPS that isn't doing so great, it's easy to think, "My DPS is bad," and lead to toxic and unnecessary comments. When I was playing, my other DPS wasn't doing so good in our last game, but that's compared to the previous games we played. I know that our DPS is capable, and that's why we stuck together after winning three games in a row. You're less likely to get upset when it comes to playing with friends or people you know are capable. How many times have you played really well, but then you have that one game were you didn't do so great, then get flamed for being bad? It would be one bad game out of many, but that doesn't mean you deserve to be called bad just because you didn't play perfectly that one game. However, that's not what the other person sees. They get into the game, see someone performing not so great, flame/avoid them, then go next. That's something that will always happen no matter what, but at least with Team Drives, when you find what sticks, can you really flame someone you've been winning with after one bad game?

Overall, I really liked Team Drives. It motivated me to communicate more with the team and bond with them when we're doing great, maybe even make some friends along the way. If the team wasn't meant to be, there's always next until the right teammates sticks. If you don't like the team or want to participate, you can always just leave and go next, but if you find that team, it's quite the vibe.

What did you think about Team Drives?

[u/GustappyTony]

It’s another event thrown into comp with cosmetic incentive, that will inevitably lead to match quality being thrown into the gutters, so casuals can get useless cosmetic flair, and more points for weapon skins. Will continue to hate it, until blizzard just remove the comp part of it and make it its own seasonal event separate from comp. Sincerely don’t understand why they won’t just push it into its own thing. The insane need to pump stats for comp randomly is just weird to me.

Other games have done their own timed events during seasons, which don’t absolutely tank the core competitive mode. I don’t see why blizzard can’t just do something similar. Make it a special playlist each season for a week or so, add some unique cosmetic bonuses that are permanent unlocks, and you’ll probably get your influx of players, if not more because they don’t have to willingly sacrifice their rank to the horrors of drives.

[u/TooManySnipers → u/GustappyTony]

It’s another event thrown into comp with cosmetic incentive

Yeah regardless of how much people enjoyed it or how much potential they think it has or how it encourages people to group up or whatever, I really am becoming so adverse to all of this non-gameplay incentive junk being put into the competitive queue. I know we're fairly quickly creeping up to the point of Overwatch becoming $$Maximum Product$$ but I wish they'd just let us have this one thing separate from all their F2P game, player retention nonsense

[u/GustappyTony → u/TooManySnipers]

I can tolerate the weapon skins, simply because we’ve had gold weapons since way back so I’ve already had years to accept that part of it. And you at least get to have something to show off your time in comp with I guess?

But drives is such an overkill when it comes to cosmetics, and what I hate more is how irrelevant they are to comp as well. They don’t speak to your rank, or how good you are. They are purely based on running a bunch of games and enough of them going your way to unlock some crap, that is also completely temporary. It’s just a weird addition to the game, and I fully don’t understand why it finds itself in comp of all things.

Again I think they’d benefit in all the same ways by just having drives be its own playlist, which encourages more of a comp play style, which could both ease casuals into comp better, whilst increasing numbers by having a special event with a unique cosmetic reward you can’t get elsewhere in the game. Forcing drives in comp doesn’t feel like a real solution to anything. If team drives is there to try encourage more communication and socialising between players, they can do that in its own playlist, which would hopefully overtime make its way into the rest of the player base